The Prairie Swine Centre in Saskatoon and CDPQ in Quebec are spearheading the implementation of a National Technology Transfer Strategy on behalf of the Canadian Swine Research and Development Cluster.

Swine Innovation is a national programme funded by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada involving 14 research projects being conducted by 16 universities and research organizations across Canada.

Prairie Swine Centre Information Services Manager Ken Engele says research is being conducted in areas such as swine nutrition, genomics, welfare and engineering with two main objectives, reducing the cost of production and providing market differentiation of products.

Ken Engele-Prairie Swine Centre

If I look at the category of increasing industry competitiveness or reducing cost of production, it's things looking at novel swine feeding programs, looking at the efficiency of feed additives to mitigate mycotoxin impact, looking at new genomic tools to improve meat quality and production efficiencies in swine and looking at development of standardization for swine production systems as well.

In looking at the second category of increasing pork differentiation it would be developing swine welfare assessment programmes, looking at different euthanasia techniques in addition to innovative cleaning systems for swine operations as well.

Mr Engele anticipates initial results from some of the projects to be available in a few months while results from the longer term efforts should start coming out in about a year.

He says the ultimate goal is to get the research adopted by industry and information will be communicated through various methods, including seminars, fact sheets and media releases and a special session at the 2012 Banff Pork Seminar scheduled for 17 to 20 January.